Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  III.

  Israel, in Saramago’s view, has pursued immoral and hateful policies during its entire history. And why has Israel done so? Perhaps for the same reasons that other countries have pursued hateful, immoral, expansionist policies? Not at all. Saramago traced Israel’s policies to biblical Judaism. He pointed to the story of David and Goliath, which, though commonly pictured as a tale of underdog triumph, is actually the story of a blond person (David’s blond hair seemed to catch Saramago’s attention) employing a superior technology to kill at a distance a helpless and presumably non-blond person, the unfortunate and oppressed Goliath. Today’s events, in Saramago’s fanciful interpretation, follow the biblical script precisely, as if in testimony to the Jews’ fidelity to tradition. He writes:

  The blond David of yesteryear surveys from a helicopter the occupied Palestinian lands and fires missiles at unarmed innocents; the delicate David of yore mans the most powerful tanks in the world and flattens and blows up what he finds in his tread; the lyrical David who sang praise to Bathsheba, incarnated today in the gargantuan figure of a war criminal named Ariel Sharon, hurls the “poetic” message that first it is necessary to finish off the Palestinians in order later to negotiate with those who remain.

  Saramago must have been ablaze, writing these lines.

  Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted “certitude” that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: “Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.” Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.

  Israel, in short, is a racist state by virtue of Judaism’s monstrous doctrines—racist not just against the Palestinians, but against the entire world, which it seeks to manipulate and abuse. Israel’s struggles with its neighbors, seen in that light, do take on a unique and even metaphysical quality of genuine evil—the quality that distinguishes Israel’s struggles from those of all other nations with disputed borders, no matter what the statistics of death and suffering might suggest.

  Saramago, shrewder and more sophisticated than the crowds in the Washington streets or the panelist at the Socialist Scholars Conference, did condemn the suicide bombers. He did so in two throwaway sentences at the end of his essay, sneeringly, with his own expressive ellipsis:

  “Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists. . . . Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.” And so, the deliberate act of murdering random crowds turns out to be the fault of the murdered—or, rather, of the monstrous and racist doctrines of their religion, which is Judaism.

  I don’t want to leave the impression that El País is a newspaper full of editors and writers who share those views. The newspaper right away published a commentary by a philosopher named Reyes Mate, who carefully explained that Nazi analogies tend to downplay the true meaning of Nazism, and a second commentary by the American writer Barbara Probst Solomon, a regular correspondent for El País, who skillfully pointed out that Saramago had written an essay not about the actually existing Israel and its policies but about “the Jew that is roiling around in his head.” There was, then, a balance in El País: one essay that was anti-Semitic, and two that were not.

  Still, something was remarkable in seeing, in this day and age, a fulmination against Judaism for its intrinsic hatefulness, written with the savage energy of a Nobel Prize winner, published in one of the world’s major newspapers. Surely, this, too, like the crowd in Washington and the panel discussion in New York, marks something new in our present moment.

  IV.

  You may object that, in pointing to the anti-globalists in the Washington streets and the Socialist Scholars in New York, I have focused on a radical left whose spirit of irresponsibility isn’t news. As for Saramago, isn’t he renowned for his Stalinist politics, for being a dinosaur from the 1930s? But the new tone that I refer to, the new attitude, is anything but a monopoly of the radical left. In this age of Jean-Marie Le Pen there is no point even mentioning the extreme right. For the new spirit has begun to pop up even in the most respectable of writings, in the middle of the mainstream—not everywhere, to be sure, and not even in most places, but in some places, and not always obscure ones. The new spirit has begun to pop up in a fashion that seems almost unconscious, even among people who would never dream of expressing an extreme or bigoted view, but who end up doing so anyway.

  A peculiar example appears in an essay called “Israel: The Road to Nowhere,” by the New York University historian Tony Judt, which ran as the lead article in the May 9, 2002, issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Judt is a scholar of French intellectual history, well-known and much-praised (by me, for instance, in a review in The New Yorker) for his willingness to examine, among other themes, the moral obtuseness of Jean-Paul Sartre and his followers a half-century ago. In his new essay Judt blames Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for failing to understand that, sooner or later, Israel will have to negotiate with the Palestinians, who cannot be expected to abandon their hope for national independence. Judt despairs of Sharon, but he calls on the United States to play a larger role, and he does hold aloft a hope. Everyone in the Arab-Israeli struggle has suffered over the years, but Judt points out that in recent years the world has seen many examples of enemy populations reconciling and living side by side—the French and the Germans, for instance, or, on a still grander scale, the Poles and the Ukrainians, whose mutual crimes in the 1940s surpassed anything that has taken place between Arabs and Israelis.

  That is the gist of his essay, at least ostensibly, and it seems to me unexceptionable, if perhaps a little one-sided.

  V.

  But the remarkable aspect of Judt’s essay is not the ostensible argument. It is the set of images and rhetorical devices and even the precise language that he has chosen to use. His single most emphatic trope is a comparison between Israel and French Algeria, and between the current fighting and the Algerian War. A discussion of French Algeria begins the piece, and French Algeria pops up repeatedly, and its prominence in his argument raises an interesting question, namely, Does Israel have a right to exist? The Algerian War was fought over the proposition that French Algeria, as a colonial outpost of the French imperialists, did not, in fact, have a right to exist. Most of the world eventually came to accept that proposition. But if Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France’s imperialism?

  That particular question can be answered with a dozen arguments—the nativist argument (Zionism may have been founded to rescue the European Jews, but in the past fifty years it has mostly ended up rescuing the native Jews of the Middle East instead), the social justice argument (the overwhelming majority of Israel’s Jews arrived essentially as refugees), the social utility argument (if not for Israel, which country or international agency would have raised a finger on behalf of the supremely oppressed Jews of Ethiopia and many other places?), the democratic argument (democratic states are more legitimate than undemocratic ones), and so forth.

  But it
has to be recognized that, starting in the 1960s, ever larger portions of the world did begin to gaze at Israel through an Algerian lens. Arafat launched his war against Israel in 1964, in the aftermath of the Algerian War but well before the Israelis had taken over the West Bank and Gaza, and his logic was, so to speak, strictly Algerian—a logic that regarded Israel as illegitimate per se. The comparison between Israel and French Algeria has served as one more basis for regarding Zionism as a doctrine of racial hatred—a doctrine, from this point of view, not much different from the old French notion that France had every right to conquer any African country it chose. Judt cannot share that view of Zionism, given his expressed worry about Israel’s survival. Someone who did share the view would regard Israel’s demise as desirable.

  Still, his essay emphasizes the Algerian analogy. And then, having underlined that comparison, Judt moves along to the argument that in recent times has tended to replace the one about French Algeria, now that the Algerian War has faded into the past. The newer argument compares Israel to the white apartheid Republic of South Africa, where a racist contempt for black Africans was the founding proposition of the state. Back in the days of apartheid, friends of social justice around the world had good reason to regard the white Republic of South Africa as illegitimate.

  Judt, on this note, observes that, “following fifty years of vicious repression and exploitation, white South Africans handed over power to a black majority who replaced them without violence or revenge.” And he asks, “Is the Middle East so different? From the Palestinian point of view, the colonial analogy fits and foreign precedents might apply. Israelis, however, insist otherwise.” But are the Israelis right in their insistence? He says, “Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness”—his point being, presumably, that the Israelis are wrong. But then, if Israel does in some profound way resemble apartheid South Africa, would it be right to boycott the Zionist state, just as South Africa was boycotted? One does not boycott a state merely because of some objectionable policy or other. Nobody boycotts Turkey because it mistreats the Kurds, nor Egypt because it drove out nearly its entire Jewish population.

  But if a state is racist by nature, if racism is its founding principle, as was the case in apartheid South Africa, then a boycott might well be justified, with the hope of abolishing the state entirely. Now, Judt cannot possibly regard Israel as any more comparable to apartheid South Africa than he does to French Algeria, given his concern that Israel continues to exist. Still, he does note that a new movement is, in fact, afoot to boycott Israel. He writes, “The fear of seeming to show solidarity with Sharon that already inhibits many from visiting Israel, will rapidly extend to the international community at large, making of Israel a pariah state.” Do the “many” who feel inhibited from visiting Israel merit applause for their moral consciences? Or should those people be seen as so many José Saramagos, smug in their retrograde bigotries? Judt refrains from comment, but his tone implies that he regards the “many” as more reasonable than not.

  He does say about some future resolution of the conflict, “There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one.” That is a curious comment, in the context of these other remarks. The Arab “right of return” means the right of Palestinians to return to their original, pre-1948 homes in Israel, a right that, if widely exercised, would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That is why, if Israel is to survive, “there will be no Arab right of return. ” But what is the Jewish “right of return”? That phrase can only mean what is expressed and guaranteed by Israel’s Law of Return, to wit, Israel’s commitment to welcome any Jew from around the world who chooses to come.

  What would it mean for Israel to abandon that commitment? It would mean abandoning the Zionist mission to build a shelter for oppressed Jews from around the world, which is to say, Zionism itself. It would mean abandoning Israel’s autonomy as a state—its right to draw up its own laws on immigration. Judt cannot be in favor of Israel doing any such thing. But those throwaway remarks and his choice of comparisons and analogies make it hard to know for sure.

  VI.

  His essay, all in all, seems to have been written on two levels. There is an ostensible level that criticizes Israel, although in a friendly fashion, with the criticisms meant to rescue Israel from its own errors and thereby to help everyone else who has been trapped in the conflict; and a second level, consisting of images and random phrases (the level that might attract Freud’s attention), which keep hinting that maybe Israel has no right to exist. It is worth looking at the religious images and references in Judt’s essay. There are two of these, and they express the two contradictory levels with a painful clarity.

  In his very last lines, Judt urges the Israelis to treat the Palestinian public with dignity and to turn quickly from war to peace negotiations. And, in order to give a pungency or fervor to his exhortation, he concludes by quoting a famous rabbinical remark, “And if not now, when?” He ends, that is, on a warm note of Judaism, which is plainly a sympathetic tone to adopt—a call for Israel to adhere to Judaism’s highest traditions of morality and good sense. Yet, at another point he strikes a Christian note, and of the weirdest sort.

  Judt wonders about Sharon, “Will he send the tanks into the Galilee? Put up electric fences around the Arab districts of Haifa?” Judt complains that Israel’s intellectuals are not mounting a suitable opposition to this kind of aggression. He describes the intellectuals and their failure to oppose in these words: “The country’s liberal intelligentsia who, Pilate-like, have washed their hands of responsibility.” That is, Judt compares Israel’s liberal intellectuals to Pontius Pilate, who took no responsibility for killing Jesus. That is a very strange phrase to stumble across in an essay on the Middle East. Freud’s eyebrows rise in wonder. The phrase is worth parsing. If Israel’s liberal intellectuals are Pontius Pilate, who is Sharon? He must be the Jewish high priest who orders the crucifixion. Who is Jesus? He can only be the people whom the high priest is setting out to kill—namely, the suicide bombers. Surely Judt cannot mean that the Palestinian terrorists are God.

  But then, it does seem odd that, a couple of lines down, Judt turns to the word “terrorist” and doubts its usefulness. “‘Terrorist,’ ” he writes, “risks becoming the mantra of our time, like ‘Communist,’ ‘capitalist,’ ‘bourgeois,’ and others before it. Like them, it closes off all further discussion.” Words do turn into meaningless slogans. Still, is it so unreasonable, at a moment when the astounding series of mass murders in Israel is still going on, to speak of “terrorists,” that is, of people who deliberately set out to kill randomly? The suicide bombers are, in fact, terrorists, by any conventional definition of the term. Judt cannot mean to let those people off the hook, and in one portion of his essay he sternly condemns them. Yet in the passage that follows the remark about Pontius Pilate he ends up commenting, “terror against civilians is the weapon of choice of the weak.” Presumably he means that the Palestinian bombers are weak and have had no alternative way to claim their national rights—though he doesn’t explain why the “weak” would have turned to their “weapon of choice” precisely in the aftermath of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer to create the Palestinian state in Gaza and on almost all of the West Bank.

  About José Saramago, I do believe, on the basis of the essay in El País, that the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize has gotten hung up on the Jew roiling in his head, in Barbara Solomon’s phrase. Not for one moment do I believe anything of the sort about Tony Judt. I can imagine that Judt chose to write about Pontius Pilate for the simplest and most natural reasons. The notion that the suicide bombers are sacred figures fulfilling a divine function, combined with the notion that Israel’s Jews are evil demons, has swept the world in the last few months. Even the notion that the Jews are guilty of deicide, which is Christian in origin, has in recent times spread to the Muslim world. The new young president of Syria expressed that very not
ion to the Pope, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit.

  But, once these ideas have been picked up by events and have been sent flying through the air like body parts in a terrorist attack, they can easily land anywhere, and a writer whose anger has gotten out of hand can end up making use of those notions, strictly by mistake. Doubtless a main lesson to be drawn from Judt’s essay is that even the most brilliant of university professors, lacking training and experience in journalism, may fail to command the most workaday of journalistic skills—the skill that allows a cooler-headed newsroom pro to write to deadline in tense times without losing control of the nuances and hidden meanings of his own copy.

  Losing control of his own rhetoric and nothing worse than that was, in Judt’s case, surely the error. For just as most people in the anti-globalism movement would never chant in favor of suicide bombers (even if some people did chant in favor), and just as most of the Socialist Scholars would never support the terrorists (even if one of the honored panelists did), and just as a modern, high-minded newspaper like El País would not care to publish anti-Semitic demagoguery (even if it did publish such a work), Judt, I am confident, had no intention of indulging in anti-Zionism and certainly no intention of sacralizing the terrorists or demonizing the Jews (even if that is the inference of what he ended up writing).